Georg Simmel

Quotes From

The Philosophy of Money (1907)

• It is not the bond as such, but being bound to a particular individual master that represents the real antipode of freedom.#
• The enlargement of the group goes hand in hand with the individualization and independence of its individual members.#
• Undoubtedly, socialism is directed towards a rationalization of life, towards control of life’s chance and unique elements by the law-like regularities and calculations of reason. At the same time, socialism has affinities with the hollow communistic instincts that, as the residue of times long since past, still lie in the remote corners of the soul. Socialism’s dual motivations have diametrically opposed psychic roots. On the one hand, socialism is the final developmental product of the rationalistic money economy, and on the other it is the embodiment of the most basic instincts and emotions. The distinguishing feature of its power of attraction lies in rationalism as well as a reaction to rationalism.#
• Until well into the Middle Ages, the English clergy did not form a unified group. In particular, the bishops as feudal lords belonged to the lords and were socially and politically distinct from the lower clergy. This was true as long as taxes were imposed only on landed property, of which the lower clergy had no part. As soon as the special taxation of all clerical income was introduced, a common interest for the whole stratum was created, either in terms of their opposition to it or acceptance of it. An expert on that period considers this event to be one of the most important bonds that first made the clergy a unified estate.#
• The development of private property originally and most intensively did not take up the products of labour as such but the tools of labour, including weapons. For tools function most directly as extensions of the limbs, and the resistance of the objects against our impulses is usually experienced only at their end-point. The activity factor present in owning tools is greater than for other possessions and therefore, next to the body, they are the possession that is most completely incorporated into the Ego.#
• The binding of the peasants to their economic position, the binding of their existence to their possessions, runs parallel to the decline of the money economy.#
• The intellectual flowering of Florence in comparison with Genoa and Venice, which were equally wealthy and endowed with talents, has been attributed partly to the fact that these two had become rich during the Middle Ages largely through commerce, whereas the Florentines, ever since the thirteenth century, had become rich mainly as bankers. The nature of banking required less specific work and left them more freedom for the development of higher interests!#
• Those professional classes whose productivity lies outside the economy proper have emerged only in the money economy—those concerned with specific intellectual activity such as teachers and literary people, artists and physicians, scholars and state officials. As long as a barter economy prevails there are only very few of them and then mostly on the basis of substantial land ownership. This is the reason why, during the Middle Ages, the Church, and to some extent the nobility, were the supporters of intellectual life.#
• The lonely settler in the German or American forests is non-dependent; the inhabitants of a modern metropolis are independent in the positive sense of the word, and even though they require innumerable suppliers, workers and cooperators and would be lost without them, their relationship to them is completely objective and is only embodied in money. Thus the city dweller is not dependent upon any of them as particular individuals but only upon their objective services which have a money value and may therefore be carried out by any interchangeable person.#
• The more people develop relationships with one another, the more abstract and generally acceptable must be their medium of exchange; conversely, if such a medium exists, then it permits agreements over otherwise inaccessible distances, an inclusion of the most diverse persons in the same project, an interaction and thereby a unification of people who, because of their spatial, social, personal and other discrepancies in interests, could not possibly be integrated into any other group formation.#
• While at an earlier stage man paid for the smaller number of his dependencies with the narrowness of personal relations, often with their personal irreplaceability, we are compensated for the great quantity of our dependencies by the indifference towards the respective persons and by our liberty to change them at will.#
• The general tendency [of the money economy], however, undoubtedly moves in the direction of making the individual more and more dependent upon the achievements of people, but less and less dependent upon the personalities that lie behind them. Both phenomena have the same root and form the opposing sides of one and the same process: the modern division of labour permits the number of dependencies to increase just as it causes personalities to disappear behind their functions, because only one side of them operates, at the expense of all those others whose composition would make up a personality.#
• Each obligation that does not exist with regard to a mere idea corresponds to the right of someone else to make demands.#
• What separates Nietzsche from all socialist evaluations is most distinctly characterized by the fact that, for him, only the quality of mankind has any significance, so that a single highest example determines the value of an era, whereas for socialism only the degree of diffusion of desirable conditions and values is relevant.#
• The quality of an artistic period is not the result of the height and quantity of good average achievements but only of the height of the very best achievement.#
• Very crass social differences and the insurmountable distance between classes usually go hand in hand with social harmony. The call for egalitarian reforms or for revolutions is usually raised only after the rigidity of class barriers has been alleviated and a livelier movement within society has brought about certain intermediate transitional phenomena and a degree of contact between the social orders which allows mutual comparison. As soon as this happens, however, the lower classes become aware of their subjugation and the upper classes of their moral responsibility as well as their interest in defending their position, and social harmony is disrupted.#
• The concept of a market price for values which, according to their nature, reject any evaluation except in terms of their own categories and ideals is the perfect objectification of what cynicism presents in the form of a subjective reflex.#
• Money that has become an ultimate purpose does not tolerate the co-ordinated definite values even of those goods that are of a non-economic nature. Money is not content with being just another final purpose of life alongside wisdom and art, personal significance and strength, beauty and love; but in so far as money does adopt this position it gains the power to reduce the other purposes to the level of means. . . . To insist on keeping them as if they were incomparable values must appear stupid as long as one can get them back for money at any time, and above all as long as the precise expressibility of their monetary value has robbed them of their existing individual significance and their significance outside the purely indifferent economy.#
• Character always means that persons or things are definitely committed to an individual mode of existence as distinct from and excluding any other.#
• The more people there are, the fewer are the spheres within which they can base their transactions except through monetary interests. #
• Whoever lives in direct contact with nature and knows no other form of life may enjoy its charm subjectively, but he lacks that distance from nature that is the basis for aesthetic contemplation and the root of that quiet sorrow, that feeling of yearning estrangement and of a lost paradise that characterizes the romantic response to nature.#
• Modern man’s relationship to his environment usually develops in such a way that he becomes more removed from the groups closest to him in order to come closer to those more remote from him.#
• Artistic realism makes the same mistake as scientific realism by assuming that it can dispense with an a priori, with a form that—springing from the inclinations and needs of our nature—provides a robe or a metamorphosis for the world of our senses. This transformation that reality suffers on its way to our consciousness is certainly a barrier between us and its immediate existence, but is at the same time the precondition for our perception and representation of it.#
• Money, as an intermediate link between man and thing, enables man to have, as it were, an abstract existence, a freedom from direct concern with things and from a direct relationship to them, without which our inner nature would not have the same chances of development. If modern man can, under favourable circumstances, secure an island of subjectivity, a secret, closed-off sphere of privacy—not in the social but in a deeper metaphysical sense—for his most personal existence, which to some extent compensates for the religious style of life of former times, then this is due to the fact that money relieves us to an ever-increasing extent of direct contact with things, while at the same time making it infinitely easier for us to dominate them and select from them what we require.#
• The principle that the minority has to conform to the majority indicates that the absolute or qualitative value of the individual voice is reduced to an entity of purely quantitative significance.#
• Wherever equality impinges upon the formal foundations of human relationships, it serves to express individual inequalities most pointedly and far-reachingly.#
• Even if we presuppose that the whole of objective reality is determined by the functions of our mind, we still identify as intelligence those functions of our mind through which reality appears to us as objective in the specific sense of the word, regardless of how much intelligence itself may also be enlivened and directed by other forces.#
• The financial importance of some Florentine families during the Medici period was based on the fact that they were banished by the Medici or deprived of their political power.#
• The attempts to derive all economic values from a single source and to reduce them to a single expression—such as labour, costs, uses, etc.—would certainly not have arisen had not the convertibility of all these values into money, into a unit of their essence, suggested it and had it not served as a security for the recognizability of precisely this unit.#
• Amidst the torments and anxieties of the world, the state of repose often appears to us as the absolute ideal until we learn by experience that peace from specific things is valuable or even bearable only if it is, at the same time, peace to engage in specific things.#
• Wherever the purely negative sense of freedom [freedom from rather than freedom to] operates, freedom is considered to be incomplete and degrading.#
• The shrewd despot will always choose a form for his demands that grants to his subjects the greatest possible freedom in their purely individual relationships. The terrible tyrannies of the Italian Renaissance are, at the same time, the ideal breeding ground for the most unrestricted growth of the individual with his ideal and private interests; and at all times—from the Roman Empire to Napoleon III—political despotism has been found to be accompanied by a licentious private libertinism. For its own benefit, despotism will restrict its demands to what is essential for it and will make its measure and kind endurable by granting the greatest possible freedom for everything else.#
• Where the constitutions, state of health, temperament, internal and external forms of life and orientations are largely the same within the group, the chance that the children will turn out well depends less upon whether the parents agree and complement each other than it does in a highly differentiated society. It therefore seems quite natural and expedient that the choice of the partner should be determined by reasons other than purely individual affection. Yet personal attraction should be decisive in a highly individualized society where a harmonious relationship between two individuals becomes increasingly rare.#
• Christianity has ingrained to a large extent the need for an ultimate purpose by its continuous consciousness of it over a long period, so that those who now reject the doctrine shall leave behind them the heritage of an empty longing for a definite purpose of their whole existence: the need has outlived its fulfilment.#
• What we term the objective significance of things is, in practice, their validity for a larger circle of subjects.#
• The enlargement of the social group requires the transition to expressing merit in money terms because it means the inescapable atomization of such a group.#
• The qualities that could be asserted validly about the interrelationship of the parts would lead to contradictions if asserted about the whole.#
• The functional value of money exceeds its value as a substance the more extensive and diversified are the services it performs and the more rapidly it circulates.#
• Metal money stands on an equal basis with paper money as a result of the growing psychological indifference to its value as metal.#
• Our mind has no substantial unity, but only the unity that results from the interaction between the subject and object into which the mind divides itself. . . . To have a mind means nothing more than to execute this inner separation, to make the self an object, to be able to know oneself.#
• It makes no difference how one expresses it: either that there is an absolute but it can be grasped only by an infinite process, or that there are only relations but that they can only replace the absolute in an infinite process.#
• Epistemology here encounters a typical hazard. In analysing itself, it judges its own case. It needs a vantage point outside itself, and is confronted with a choice between excepting itself from the test or rule imposed on all other knowledge, thus leaving itself open to attack from behind; or else subjecting itself to the laws and the process which it has discovered and thereby committing an act of circular reasoning, as is clearly illustrated by the self-negation of scepticism.#
• If we did not assume general conditions, universal drives and regular series of effects as a basis for specific cases, there would not be any historical explanation at all; the whole would disintegrate into a chaos of atomized events.#
• We dignify with the name of ‘truth’ those representations that, active within us as real forces or motions, incite us to useful behaviour.#
• Actions carried out on the basis of representations that are not at all identical with objective being nevertheless secure results of a reliability, expediency and accuracy that could hardly be greater if we knew the objective conditions as they are in themselves, whereas other activities based on ‘false’ representations tend to injure us.#
• The idea that life is essentially based on intellect, and that intellect is accepted in practical life as the most valuable of our mental energies, goes hand in hand with the growth of a money economy.#
• Social interaction, diffusion and standardization provide the individual with the dignity and reliability of a style of life which is later confirmed as being objectively just.#
• We believe that . . . we derive moral imperatives from religious dogmas, whereas we actually believe in the dogmas because the moral imperatives vitally concern us.#
• Exchange, i.e. the economy, is the source of economic values, because exchange is the representative of the distance between subject and object which transforms subjective feelings into objective valuation.#
• If we were to assume that there is only a single line in the whole world, it would not have any specific length since it lacks any relation to others. It is impossible to measure the world as a whole, because there is nothing outside the world in relation to which it could have a specific size.#
• Our painful experience of sacrifice and our effort to diminish it leads us to believe that its total elimination would raise life to perfection. But here we overlook that sacrifice is by no means always an external obstacle, but is the inner condition of the goal itself and the road by which it may be reached. . . . Sacrifice is not only the condition of specific values, but the condition of value as such.#
• Exchange is just as productive and value-creating as is production itself. In both cases one is concerned with receiving goods for the price of other goods in exchange, in such a way that the final situation shows a surplus of satisfaction as compared with the situation before the action.#
• Value does not originate from the unbroken unity of the moment of enjoyment, but from the separation between the subject and the content of enjoyment as an object that stands opposed to the subject as something desired and only to be attained by the conquest of distance, obstacles and difficulties. #
• Valuation as a real psychological occurrence is part of the natural world; but what we mean by valuation, its conceptual meaning, is something independent of this world; is not part of it, but is rather the whole world viewed from a particular vantage point. . . . Our whole life, from the point of view of consciousness, consists in experiencing and judging values, and it acquires meaning and significance only from the fact that the mechanically unfolding elements of reality possess an infinite variety of values beyond their objective substance. . . . Even objective perception can arise only from valuation – we live in a world of values which arranges the contents of reality in an autonomous order.#
• If we suppose that the usefulness of money is the reason for its acceptance, its material value may be regarded as a pledge for that usefulness.#
• Because the wealth of the Jews consisted of money, they became a particularly sought-after and profitable object of exploitation, for no other possessions can be expropriated as easily, simply and without loss. . . . The same specific character of money as lacking in any specific determinacy which made it the most suitable and the least refusable source of income for the Jews in their position as pariahs, also made it the most convenient and direct incentive for exploiting them.#
• Money is perhaps the clearest expression and demonstration of the fact that man is a ‘tool-making’ animal, which, however, is itself connected with the fact that man is a ‘purposive’ animal.#
• Purposefulness is essentially a relational concept since it always presupposes something alien to the purpose that has to be transformed. If such a transformation were not necessary, if the will contained its realization within itself, there would be no formation of purposes.#
• Purposive action is therefore rooted in the nature of the mind. . . . As natural beings we are in constant interaction with the world of nature, and co-ordinated with it. It is only in purposive action that the self as personality differentiates itself from the natural elements within and outside itself.#
• The more precise the form in which money renders its services, the smaller is the quantity of money required and the more easily can its place be taken by a more rapid circulation.#
• Credit and cash do not simply replace each other, but that each produces a more lively activity of the other#
• The fixed residences of princes, which require centralization, are possible only with the emergence of money taxes, for taxes paid in kind cannot be transported and they are appropriate only to a wandering court which consumes them as it goes. It is in the same spirit that modern tax policy tends to leave taxes on real property to local authorities, and to reserve income tax for the state. By focusing the tax demands of the central power upon the money income of the individual, it grasps precisely the kind of property with which it has the closest relation. #
• The growing certainty that coin will be accepted at its face value makes possible a diminution in the intrinsic value of the metal content without altering the total value.#
• Just as my thoughts must take the form of a universally understood language so that I can attain my practical ends in this roundabout way, so must my activities and possessions take the form of money value in order to serve my more remote purposes.#Quoted in Steven Horwitz, “Monetary Exchange as an Extra-Linguistic Social Communication Process” (1992)
• If the profit from debasement of the coinage had not been contingent upon the size of the area, the chaos of coins in Germany would have been much worse, because of the terrible frivolity with which the privilege of coinage was granted to every monastery and every small town.#
• The exchange of the products of labour, or of any other possessions, is obviously one of the purest and most primitive forms of human socialization; not in the sense that ‘society’ already existed and then brought about acts of exchange but, on the contrary, that exchange is one of the functions that creates an inner bond between men—a society, in place of a mere collection of individuals. Society is not an absolute entity which must first exist so that all the individual relations of its members—super—and subordination, cohesion, imitation, division of labour, exchange, common attack and defence, religious community, party formations and many others—can develop within its framework or be represented by it: it is only the synthesis or the general term for the totality of these specific interactions. Any one of the interactions may, of course, be eliminated and ‘society’ still exist, but only if a sufficiently large number of others remain intact. If all interaction ceases there is no longer any society. In the same way, a living organism can continue to exist if one or the other of its functions—which is an interaction between parts—ceases, but it cannot live if all functions cease, because ‘life’ is nothing but the sum of interacting forces among the atoms of the organism. It is, therefore, almost a tautology to say that exchange brings about socialization: for exchange is a form of socialization. It is one of those relations through which a number of individuals become a social group, and ‘society’ is identical with the sum total of these relations.#
• The lending of money divides its activity into two parts and increases enormously the product of its economic energy. But the intellectual abstraction on which this process rests can attain its results only in a firmly established and civilized social order, in which it is possible to lend money with relative security and to base economic activity on this partial function of money.#
• Our intellect can grasp reality only as a modification of pure concepts, which, no matter how much they diverge from reality, are legitimized by the service they render in the interpretation of reality.#
• When the Bank of England ceased to redeem its notes between 1796 and 1819 the fall in the value of gold was only 3–5 per cent, but commodities prices rose 20–50 per cent as a result!#
• Although, in principle, the exchange function of money could be accomplished by mere token money, no human power could provide a sufficient guarantee against possible misuse. The functions of exchange and reckoning obviously depend upon a limitation of the quantity of money, upon its ‘scarcity’, as the expression goes.#
• Economic interactions take place with such admirable expediency, by subtly organized dovetailing of innumerable details, that it would be necessary to assume that they were integrated by a superior mind, operating with superhuman wisdom, if one did not fall back upon the unconscious power of adaptation of the human species. The conscious intentions and foresight of individuals would not suffice to maintain the harmony that economic activity displays alongside its fearful discords and inadequacies. We have to assume that there are unconscious experiences and calculations which accumulate during the historical development of the economy and which regulate its course.#
• The value of things—ethical as well as eudæmonistic, religious as well as aesthetic—hovers, like the Platonic ideas, above the world; a realm that is governed by its own alien and intangible inner norms, but that lends relief and colour to reality.#